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It's a good idea, but what if you came up short for a few shifts? Should the business owner be required to pay for more pharmacists because the ones on staff won't prescribe the right medication due to moral beliefs?

To take the point further, when hiring the replacement pharmacists could you then specify that you were looking for a non-religious one to fill the gap? Would that be religious discrimination? Would you then get sued out of business for the discrimination, or would you go out business because of the increased staffing costs?

Either way, it's not a healthy precedent to set. If you want to be a doctor, you must learn to cut flesh and prescribe medicine, otherwise you are a faith healer. If you want to be a pharmacist, do your job, and leave God out of it.

I think the pharmacist does have a moral right to not fill certain prescriptions. But I don't think this right applies to the pharmacy.

If the pharmacy has an employee that refuses to fill such scripts, that pharmacy would be required to have on duty another pharmacist willing to fill that script.

Even on the slowest shifts.

Wayne: Thanks for your comments, and I admit that the electric utility is an imperfect analogy. But pharmacists do perform a regulated public service, and I think it's fair to hold them to a slightly stricter service standard than, say, your average widget maker.

To answer your question: I would not force small-town physicians to perform abortions, nor lobotomies, nor breast augmentation. For that matter, I don't expect anybody who wants to practice pharmacy to violate their consciences either -- but I do think it's fair, then, to ask them not to practice pharmacy. We wouldn't expect a Christian Scientist to dispense prescriptions; this is not dissimilar, I think.

There's a difference, too, between the procedures you describe and the issue at hand. Abortions, lobotomies and breast augmentation are all extra-ordinary procedures, so access is necessarily limited. Reproductive health, though, requires ongoing maintenance -- and thus creates an undue burden on the public.

I'm not going to pretend this is easy; I'm sympathetic to matters of conscience. But I think the burden in this case falls upon the pharmacist, not the customer.

Joel:

A public utility uses public right-of-way and enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly. The product, power, is content neutral.

By contrast, the vast majority of pharmacists are private practitioners, working for themselves or private enterprise. They dispense a great variety of drugs, some of which are controversial and harmful. Should a pharmacist be forced to fill a morphine prescription for someone he knows will abuse it -- someone he fears will be seriously harmed or killed by the lawful prescription? No. Should a pharmacist be forced to dispense a drug that he or she knows will kill an embryo?

The consumer can choose another pharmacist, even if it means traveling a great distance. The fact that a private practitioner may operate in an isolated village does not negate his/her right to avoid a personal crisis of conscience. I have to know this, Joel: would you support a government mandate that would force small town physicians to perform abortions? How about lobotomies, or breast augmentation?

If thine eye offend thee cut it out i think the Good book says. You can't make Heaven on earth,no matter how hard the religious right tries.
Funny when the left wingers want to ban smoking or fatty foods the right screams bloody murder, but when it suits their ideology hypocrisy is OK.

If you don't like the way your pharmacist is behaving, take your business elsewhere.

Don't liberals believe in substantive due process that "shocks the conscience"?
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Chuck Johnson is a student at Claremont McKenna College. Feel free to contact him.

I might be able to buy David Freddoso's take if pharmacists were, say, Fuller Brush salesmen -- dispensing nice-but-unnecessary goods that we can enjoy at our leisure.

That's not the case, of course. Pharmacies and pharmacists may practice privately, but they serve a public need -- that's why they're regulated and licensed by state governments, which are acting in the interest of public health. In this sense, pharmacies are much like electrical utilities -- both are often the only game in town in their respective fields. If ConEd decided to stop selling electricity to the Catholic Church because of theological differences, we'd -- rightly -- be shocked and try to put an end to it.

If pharmacists don't feel they can dispense birth control medicine, then they shouldn't be pharmacists. They have made the choices to put their professional obligations in conflict with their consciences; they shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.

And it's finally worth noting that the Wisconsin case above is particularly egregious. This pharmacist wasn't just acting on his own conscience; he decided to infringe upon the conscience of his customer, not allowing her to transfer her prescription elsewhere. That's abhorrent, bullying behavior that should not be tolerated.